Greets,
A basic website built using Forrest 0.7 has been uploaded to the
repository. I opted to put it outside trunk because Lucy's going to
have a lot in there as it is, what with all the build targets. The
site still needs some stuff fleshed out, which I'll take care of
forthwith.
To modify the website's content, edit the xml docs in website/src/
documentation/content. Presuming that you have successfully
installed Forrest, when you finish editing simply issue the command
"forrest" from within the "website" directory, and everything will
get exported to website/build/site.
If you want to modify the website's appearance, there's no way around
learning Forrest. It's fairly easy to work with -- so long as you
never venture off the beaten path. I understand they're working on
making it more flexible, which would be a good thing. There were two
main challenges.
First, Forrest starts you off with a directory that's pretty bloated,
with the expectation that you'll edit it down. It's hard to find
your way around at first, and also hard to determine what you don't
need. I was pretty aggressive about deleting stuff: a few warnings
crop up when I generate the site now, but they don't seem to matter.
Second, the header area of the default "skin", called "pelt", is kind
of messed up, and fixing things so that the appearance was acceptable
to this former graphic designer required some minor hackery: the
header graphic is actually an oversized background image (so you
can't see the tiling), and the links are transparent png images on
top. I'm not going to get into the gory details of why I chose that
path, but the main reason was that that hack introduced less
complexity -- and therefore, less of a maintenance burden -- than
building a custom "skin".
The header graphic was built using Adobe Illustrator 10, and the
source AI doc can be found at website/graphics_working/
lucy_header.ai. I skipped adding source docs for the clear png's.
Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com/
